bellascribe

Katherine Mansfield.

He asked the class if any young lady present had ever been chased by a wild bull. She raised her hand because “nobody else did… (though of course I hadn’t). Ah, he said, I am afraid you do not count. You are a little savage from New Zealand.”

Ali Smith salutes her awesome spirit. Read this first thing this morning and have spent the day absorbed in her stories. This was not what I was supposed to be doing. Or so I thought. Maybe I was. I guess it’s better said that I had some work to do that didn’t get done.

I am just now forcing myself to put away this book I found years ago, some secondhand shop, probably in Asheville during a residency period — Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and The Writer, Gillian Boddy. I loved, still love this book because it’s got some of everything for the generalist: biography, snippets from her journal, photos, her handwriting, but also her stories and bits about her stories, i.e. what she said in various letters to others and self (in her journals). And what others said about the stories, including what Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal about a story, for example.

The start of At the Bay:

Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling — how far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again … 

What she wrote about it to Dorothy Brett, September 1912:

I’ve wandered about all sorts of places — in and out — I hope it is good. It is as good as I can do, and all my heart and soul is in it…every single bit. Oh God, I hope it gives pleasure to someone…it is so strange to bring the dead to life again. There’s my Grandmother, back in her chair with her pink knitting…And one feels possessed. And then the place where it all happens. I have tried to make it as familiar to “you” as it it to me. You know the marigolds…one tries to go deep — to speak to the secret self we all have.

And then in her journal, October 16, 1921:

It took me nearly a month to “recover” from “At the Bay”…I could not get away from the sound of the sea and Beryl fanning her hair at the window. These things would not die down. But now I am not at all sure about that story. It seems to me it’s a little “wispy” — not what it might have been.

And then later yet, November 13, 1921:

As I reread At the Bay in proof, it seemed to me flat, dull, and not a success at all. I was very much ashamed of it. I am.

(Critics and readers do not agree with the latter. This reader — I do not.) Putting the book away. For now.